The immigration fix hiding in plain sight

What should America’s immigration policy be?

This might seem like an absurd question to ask in a year when our current immigration agenda involves sending hundreds of people — including some who came here legally and many with no criminal record — to a Salvadoran maximum security prison known for human rights abuses, revoking the visas of PhD candidates and researchers in the country over speeding tickets or missing customs forms, and killing our tourism industry with random imprisonments and harassment at the border.

All the while, Vice President JD Vance posts on X that we cannot afford to worry about “due process.” Yes, he put a foundational constitutional right in scare quotes because of the necessity of deporting the alleged 20 million people who came to the US illegally under Joe Biden. Although these claims that Biden let in tens of millions of people are popular on the right, there are literally no credible estimates to suggest that 20 million immigrants, legal or not, entered under his tenure. Most credible estimates are that between 4 million and 6 million people entered the US illegally during the Biden administration, and 8 million total.

In the face of all that, it feels futile to try to outline what our approach to immigration should be. Any immigration policy at all that obeys the Constitution would be an improvement over the current situation.

Every single one of the things I mentioned above is wildly underwater in the polls, but voters still tend to support Trump’s handling of immigration overall. That suggests Democrats have a serious challenge: They need to communicate immigration policies to voters that are a clear break from Biden’s approach. His expansion of temporary protected status and the increase in asylum seekers didn’t move the needle in favor of the party.
Now, the Trump administration has chosen to pursue a lawless, vindictive, court-defying campaign against every immigrant in the country — and it’s essential that the Democratic Party develop a coherent alternative that can actually win elections. While I can’t, of course, speak for the party, I wanted to take a shot over the next few weeks at articulating some of the policies I want to see on immigration. That way when the public turns on this administration’s campaign of destruction, there are some compelling alternatives on offer.

I am strongly in favor of immigration.

Immigrants make America stronger — high-skilled immigrants working in tech and science and medicine as well as immigrants working in agriculture and construction, who serve essential roles in the US economy. Immigration is good for the people who come here, but it’s also good for the people already here. It benefits America to be more populous — a bigger country has more power on the world stage, which benefits Americans in trade agreements, consumer goods access, international policy, and much more. Immigrants to the US tend to assimilate effectively, immigrant crime rates are strikingly low, and immigrant kids overperform academically, all of which enriches us as a country.

But immigration policy in a democracy requires a careful balance.

The public is generally supportive of immigration under some circumstances but fiercely opposed to it under others. Most legal immigration programs are individually popular, as are some paths to legal status for people who have been here illegally for a long time. But public opinion ricochets back and forth on immigration far more than on other contentious issues like abortion. When Biden’s term started, only 28 percent of Americans wanted immigration to decrease. By mid-2024, 55 percent did. And they cared a lot about it: Immigration routinely appeared near the top of reasons people voted Republican and is still the issue where Trump’s polling is best.

Biden adopted policies that resulted in a lot more people coming to the US illegally or with temporary status than any previous governments. There were, of course, factors outside his control; the economy and conditions in Central America dramatically affected immigrant flows. But policy mattered, too.

And the way the Biden administration responded to the surge of people at the border rapidly turned Americans against immigration and against Biden and Democrats. It even contributed to Trump’s return to power. Biden realized this and cracked down at the border in 2024, but belatedly. Neither his initial expansion of immigration nor the subsequent crackdown involved much in the way of making the case to Americans for the policies he was pursuing or explaining to skeptical voters why they would benefit.

The Biden administration’s unilateral, executive order-driven approach to immigration turned out to be a terrible mistake. For one thing, immigrants need stability and long-term assurance that they’ll be allowed to stay in the country, and any policy implemented by executive order can later be reversed by executive order, throwing lives into chaos. “Failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists,” Derek Thompson at The Atlantic warned last year. Immigration is crucial to our country, and voters are open to it — but they have to believe it’s being done well.

It’s not entirely Biden’s fault that he couldn’t get a process through Congress. Both parties have called for comprehensive immigration reform for decades but are happy enough to kick the can down the road, and Trump opposed the bipartisan bill that did come up during Biden’s term. Congress isn’t doing its job, but the president still shouldn’t have tried to route around them.

There’s at long last a chance that the absurd abuses of the present moment will persuade Congress to stop putting it off and genuinely reform immigration. If that happens, what should we hope it will look like?

The first thing we need is a full re-embrace of international students. It is a very good thing that people from all over the world want to come to America to learn. It’s a source of income for American universities, businesses, and communities; it is a chance for Americans to meet, learn from, learn with, and share our culture with people from very different backgrounds than our own. And many of them stay and go on to become very successful in America and innovate crucial technologies, as my colleague Bryan Walsh explained earlier this month.

As part of embracing students, Congress should pass explicit free speech protections for visa holders, taking away the secretary of state’s power to kick a student out of the country for writing an op-ed. (I think those deportations are likely to be found unconstitutional, but a new set of formal legal protections for student visa holders will be a good way to shut the door on that chapter.)

While we’re at it, we should also reinforce existing laws and, where necessary, add new ones to protect against other Trump abuses: The government should not have the right to send anyone to prison indefinitely without trial — whether the person is a US citizen or not and whether the prison is in the US or not — and Border Patrol should need a warrant to seize and read our phones.

The second component of a better immigration policy is to expand and improve our pipeline of workers. There’s a deep shelf of good proposals to improve the H-1B visa program, which brings talented people who are crucial hires for the US. Right now, the program works by a lottery, so that everyone who is eligible submits an application for an H-1B and only some get one — with no relationship between who we need most and who we get.

Advocates for better immigration processes have been begging us to fix this for a long time. We should also modestly expand the number of H-1Bs we offer, which would be a win for applicants, the companies that want to hire them, and taxpayers who benefit from the taxes that people pay and the value they create when they move here.

It should also be easier for the spouses of people on H-1B visas to work in the US, and we should end the country-specific green card process rules that force immigrants from India and China to wait much longer to become permanent residents and citizens than immigrants from anywhere else.

And while skilled workers are the most clear-cut win, we should improve the pipelines for all workers. People do not only make America wealthier and better off by coming here if they are going to be a software engineer. We also benefit from the hard work of immigrants in manual labor. The reliance on illegal immigrants in our construction and agriculture industries is, frankly, something to be ashamed of. If we want someone’s labor, we should provide a legal pathway for it. (Again, none of these are new ideas or even partisan ideas. They’re just ideas I think are worth spotlighting as we try to offer a positive vision on immigration.)

Historically, the grand bargain imagined in an immigration deal would be a marriage of these proposals to welcome more people to America (which Democrats support) with a step up in border security and enforcement (which Republicans support). In a future newsletter, I’ll argue that whether or not there’s bipartisan compromise on the table, we have to pursue immigration policy with an eye to both parts of that picture — or we get neither.